On 11 September 2011, three people were killed in the second-floor apartment of a home in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was a little less than two years before the Boston Marathon bombings. The victims, Brendan Mess, Erik Weissman, and Raphael Teken, were respectively 25, 31, and 37. The apartment was Mess’s. The crime scene, journalist Susan Zalkind would later explain in a documentary, was “bizarre”. The three men had their throats slit. Whoever killed the three men had dumped marijuana on their bodies and left a reported $5,000 behind.
The Waltham murders did not make national headlines at the time. It wasn’t until two years later, after the Boston bombings, that they were brought back to the forefront. The reason: A main suspect in the Waltham murders was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two Boston bombers.
